An indispensable preliminary was the provision of a boundary fence enclosing an area of three acres of common land. This fence was of simple planking ten feet in height. Inside this space the shell of a slight temporary prison had also been erected, a two-storied building, of wood on an iron framework filled in with brick “nogging” (a single brick thick), the cells lined and separated with sheet iron. Nine of these cells were completed with locked doors and barred windows when they were at once occupied by nine “special class” prisoners, men who were in the last year of a lengthy sentence and little likely to run away and forfeit privileges already earned. From this germ or nucleus the whole establishment grew. The first comers laboured on the still unfinished cells and as they were gotten ready fresh arrivals were imported to fill them. In a short time the whole block of a hundred cells was completed, and with the numbers which could now be lodged there was strength sufficient for very extended operations: the erection of a second block for another hundred convicts; and the preparation of clay for brickmaking, and the digging for the foundations of the main prison. Such rapid progress was made that within six months I had established the brick mills and had turned out a large number of “London stock,”—the sound, hard, light yellow bricks, the chief building material of our modern metropolis. The place was largely self-contained and self-supporting; we did everything as far as possible for ourselves; we had our own carpenters and smiths; we dressed stone for the window sills and cast the iron bars and framework for staircases. Ere long the prison population reached a daily average of from five to six hundred, and in less than five years we had built four large blocks containing 350 cells apiece, a spacious chapel, a boundary wall and beyond it numerous residences for the governor and staff. Throughout this period, Millbank was the parent prison, Wormwood Scrubs only an offshoot drawing support, supplies, cash, all necessaries from the older establishment.